Researchers Have Started Smoking As They Believe AI Will Cure Cancer, Claims Palantir Top Executive

Artificial intelligence (AI) researchers are betting on the technology to come good to cure cancer by turning themselves into guinea pigs. Speaking to CBS News, Palantir Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Shyam Sankar claimed that some AI researchers were taking up smoking as they believed that AI would eventually cure cancer.

Though Sankar did not name any researchers or provide any evidence of the claim, he highlighted that the techies were using the logic of AI making medical breakthroughs easier.

"So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signalling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," Sankar was quoted as saying

"I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in."

In the same interview, Sankar criticised Silicon Valley's "mass psychosis" and "social delusion" around AI.

"So there is kind of this mass psychosis, social delusion around it, and I think it's getting in the way of actually what is happening with AI. Where is it meeting the American worker in industry? What are the results of doing that, and the doomsdayers have basically been wrong," he said.

"Everything they predicted, they told us that ChatGPT 2.0 was too dangerous to release. They told us at this point in the timeline, we'd already have mass unemployment and job displacement, and the economists see that actually we're having job growth in areas that we wouldn't have predicted doing exactly that."

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AI And Health

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has predicted that AI would find cures for most diseases, including cancers, within 5 to 15 years,

“I am not talking about AI as merely a tool to analyse data. I'm talking about using AI to perform, direct, and improve upon nearly everything biologists do,” Amodei wrote in a social media post.

“Thus, it's my guess that powerful AI could at least 10x the rate of these discoveries, giving us the next 50-100 years of biological progress in 5-10 years.”

Previously, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis gs also talked about AI models revolutionising human health by increasing lifespans.

"If everything goes well, then we should be in an era of radical abundance, a kind of golden era. AGI can solve what I call root-node problems in the world, curing terrible diseases, much healthier and longer lifespans, finding new energy sources," said Hassabis.

"If that all happens, then it should be an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonise the galaxy. I think that will begin to happen in 2030," he added.